MANTRA's native token fell 18.5% from its 24-hour high to an all-time low shortly before MANTRA Chain stopped producing blocks and its team announced a precautionary halt over an unexplained incident.

According to CoinGecko, MANTRA dropped from $0.005060 to a record low of $0.004126 at around 11:00 pm UTC on Thursday. The token later recovered to approximately $0.0044 but remained down roughly 10% over 24 hours, while trading volume climbed nearly 600% to $24 million.

In a Friday post on X, MANTRA said it was "aware of an incident affecting MANTRA Chain" and had halted the network as a precaution while it investigated. "We don't have a root cause or timeline to share yet," the project said, adding that all endpoints and transactions were frozen.

The halt prevents assets from moving on MANTRA Chain — a layer-1 blockchain focused on real-world asset tokenization, built using the Cosmos SDK — and has prompted affected exchanges to pause deposits and withdrawals, a routine safeguard while a network is unable to confirm transactions. No timeline has been given for either service to resume.

MANTRA Chain remains halted as investigation continues

MANTRA's status page classified the incident as a full outage affecting public endpoints, validators, bridge migration operations and MANTRA-managed Inter-Blockchain Communication relays. The team said it would not restart the network until it was confident it was safe to do so. Coordinated validator restarts are an established recovery path for halted proof-of-stake chains: Solana, one of the most heavily used networks, resumed block production that way after an hours-long outage in February 2024.

The network's public RPC listed block 17,449,398, produced at 11:13 pm UTC on Thursday, as its latest block. MANTRA posted its initial incident notice at 11:44 pm, while CoinGecko showed the token reaching its low at about 11:10 pm.

MANTRA has not said whether the price movement was related to the incident or whether any assets were lost or placed at risk. Cointelegraph contacted the MANTRA team for additional information but did not receive a response by publication. For now, updates have come through the project's status page and its X account, and the key open items — a root cause, a safe restart and the resumption of exchange deposits and withdrawals — all remain without a timetable.

The decline follows a period of upheaval for the project. In April 2025, MANTRA's former OM token collapsed, plunging more than 90% from about $6.30 to below $0.50 and erasing more than $5 billion in market value. Separately, Mantra has said its CEO began the process of burning his 150 million OM tokens.

In June, Inveniam Capital Partners announced plans to acquire MANTRA after investing $20 million in the project in 2025. The acquisition followed January layoffs and restructuring, after CEO John Patrick Mullin described 2025 as the project's most challenging year.